


Impulse and Adrenaline

by twopoint



Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: M/M, Schwarz - Freeform, weiss kreuz - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-17
Updated: 2009-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:09:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twopoint/pseuds/twopoint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poison apple trees and mind games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impulse and Adrenaline

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to voksen for the beta

After having lived so long by impulse and adrenaline, Schuldig had forgotten how to make decisions. Two fingers on his right hand were broken; he could hear nothing but ringing in his left ear, and he was too tired to keep the other voices out. A choice between death and work was not a decision.

You better fucking be dead, he thought up to the rooftops, and kept walking.

Schuldig had a lot of experience with dictators and he knew that they would promise anything to get what they wanted. They would promise freedom and fortune and states without borders, because they learned early on that people, the best and the worst of them buy, over and over, promises with an amnesiac's vigorous un-memory of pain. They buy them. Schuldig had bought them, and even when every hidden slice of logic in him surfaced to say , this can't work, Schuldig had swallowed his doubt and kept moving because he could –toward someone else's goal.

A handful of coins in his pocket, Schuldig stared at a train schedule and wondered what destination he should commit to: Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Vienna. The problem with cities was that they were riddled with people, and people look like him, with their promises. If Schuldig chose to keep going with the original plan, he knew two things for certain: if Crawford was dead, Schuldig would be forced to acknowledge it, and if Crawford was not dead, Schuldig would be forced to keep going the way things were – had been.

Schuldig decided to stay put. He convinced the proprietor of the Sofia boarding house to believe that he had already paid a week in advance. He sat on the rooftop that reeked of rotted lettuce, and he chain smoked cheap, stolen, twice-smuggled cigarettes until his fingers were frozen. The cheap tobacco smelled worse than the rotting vegetables; gases rising up to the heavens; Schuldig's tongue was rough and bitter from the smoke.

He did not sleep. When he did sleep, he slept for too long.

Three days later he abandoned every half formed plan he'd made, and picked pockets and minds for his fare until he met up with Nagi in a broken house on an island in the Bocas del Dragon. The storm bleached coast might not have been deserted, but it had seen better days, and it was quiet.

And then he showed up.

Schuldig had been stealing glances at Crawford for four hours, and he had been thinking about what he would say for six days, pacing the polished floors of the house that had been purchased three years ago for this purpose. There was white, smooth sand trapped in the grooves between the floor boards, and a ceiling fan did nothing to stir the humid air on the porch.

Crawford had been two days late, according the neatly detailed itinerary he'd forced them all to memorize months before, and Nagi had kept asking, "Where is he?" like Schuldig could read the minds of the dead, which meant they would both miss him if he didn't show up, which meant they'd been wrong about a lot of things.

But Crawford walked through the door as if he'd been there all along, and he smelled like dry wool and a cold climate. There was a vine on the side of the house that covered the window in Schuldig's bedroom, and the vine had too many thorns so he couldn't pull it down, so the room was perpetually dark, and darkness bred suspicion. Nagi proved unhelpful. Schuldig had taken to living on the porch because it was hot outside, but not as claustrophobic as the tropical shadows in the rooms, tendrils that snaked out from sandy corners.

Schuldig and Nagi didn't take their shoes off at the door; they hardly wore shoes, so they'd gotten out of the habit. The sand caught between their toes and collected in rippled dunes and Schuldig wondered how long it would take for their feet to carry enough sand to cover the floors completely, which was another reason he preferred to spend his time on the porch, he wouldn't be buried there. Plus, from the porch, he could see the road. Schuldig had not spent much time in houses, nor had he lived very long without someone telling him what to do every day.

Nagi watched movies that he pirated from some distant vault where movies were kept. None of the movies were in the same language, nor did Nagi watch them with subtitles, and Schuldig knew Nagi didn't speak every language – though he would swear that he did –and every time Schuldig entered the house, to make a drink, to piss (thought he often did this in the sunburned yard) he was assaulted by a different voice, another language, at full volume. It made Schuldig feel like the dull voices in his mind – the voices here were quiet; the place hardly populated – were amplified so he could finally hear them through his ears, where voices were supposed to be, or so he had once thought.

But Crawford had arrived; late, but present, accounted for. And Schuldig had shown him where to put his things, and fixed them both a drink, and lounged around the house as if he'd spent all his time indoors as he waited for Crawford to show up, as if he had not watched, expectantly – though the jagged ends of his fingernails and the meat around the cuticles said otherwise. As he lounged, he stole glances at Crawford and wondered where Crawford had been, the murky roads he had taken to get there.

"Another drink?" Schuldig shook the lonely ice in his glass and pressed his other hand to the splintered, weathered, grey railing as he looked out across the street toward the sea. If he never tasted salt water again, it would be too soon.

Crawford sat behind him in Schuldig's favorite chair. The wicker creaked before he answered. "I'll get it."

And Schuldig didn't turn, or steal a glance, as he listened to Crawford get up and take the glass from his hand, dangling at his hip. His hand hung there, empty, as he waited for Crawford to return, counting his steps across the sandy floor to the kitchen. The house spoke. Nagi paused the movie: Finnish again.

"Something's wrong with Schuldig," Nagi said, knowing Schuldig could hear them, knowing Schuldig knew he could hear them.

"He's fine," Crawford said, pouring gin over ice.

"No, he's not." Nagi walked to the kitchen. "He's not. You need to listen to me; I know him."

Snick. A blade cut through the thin skin of a lime. "I hear you. Give me a few days."

"You need to listen to me."

"I will."

The drink, filled, cold, returned to Schuldig's hand exactly as it had left it. Schuldig sampled the weight of it, let the glass hand there like a pendulum, an anchor, before he lifted it to his mouth and tasted the bitter quinine beneath the sweet.

"Nagi's worried about you," Crawford said, behind him, very close. He hadn't returned to the chair, which changed several possibilities that were floating through Schuldig's head, which was unusual in itself; Schuldig didn't trade in possibilities.

"That's sweet."

"I don't think you understand."

Schuldig turned to tell Crawford how he could fuck his understanding, but he was brought up short by the half-smirk on Crawford's face. He had the dizzying sensation that they had unwittingly changed places. Crawford took the drink from Schuldig's hand and placed it on the railing. The glass teetered and slid into the bare branches of the shrubbery beneath the porch.

Crawford's mouth was familiar enough; Schuldig stared at it. He knew Crawford's teeth, too even, perfectly shaped. If Schuldig brought his fist up, he could fix that, rearrange the symmetry.

"Two weeks," Crawford said. "And we'll go somewhere louder. Can you deal with that? The wait? Nagi and I both are down, we've been down the whole time – that's what you've been hearing. That, and yourself, and the three people who speak French two miles from here. I picked this place for a reason."

Schuldig wished he could stand this close and see both of Crawford's eyes at the same time, instead of having to look back and forth.

"I don't think I'm getting you," Schuldig said.

"This is you. This is what you're like, with a little bit of Nagi, and now me, thrown in. You've never been still long enough to find it."

"Nagi's been a zombie for two months. Are you sure he didn't get broken somehow? I don't know what to do with him just sitting there, acting, you know . . . normal, or some shit."

"I told him to shut everything off."

"Why didn't you tell me we were shutting down? If you meant for us to not draw attention to ourselves, I've been broadcasting like the military since we got here. We're fucked."

Crawford stared at a spot behind Schuldig's left shoulder, the water, the point at the end where some distant lights were struggling to stay on, or maybe he was only trying to find a place to keep his sight so he wouldn't have to look at Schuldig.

"I told him to try not to influence you," Crawford said, eventually. The ceiling fan was ever so slightly off balance, blade cutting with a strange tick and whoosh, rhythmic, present, but irregular.

Schuldig leaned his forehead against Crawford's shoulder, using it like he'd use a wall to take the pressure of a headache, a convenient hard surface. His head didn't hurt, but his head wasn't right; he felt an added jolt of panic – and they all knew something wasn't right. It was one thing to know it, another to have it said out loud. "So this is what I'm really like," he said in a Nagi voice, and had to press his palm to the splinters to keep from punching Crawford. "It's so nice of you both to experiment on me."

"I would be lying if I said it was Nagi's idea."

Schuldig thought about the past few days, the past few months. "Fuck – I'm really boring," he said, and he felt Crawford laugh, no sound, his hands coming to rest on Schuldig's hips, lingering, but not doing anything. Schuldig raised his head to say something cutting, but the messed up image of Crawford trying his hardest to not laugh was too weird to not follow, and Schuldig found himself reluctantly smiling. He moved his mouth closer to Crawford's, because it was either that or pick a fight.

"You must be quiet around the crazy person," Schuldig said, and he could have been talking about any of them. He brushed his lips against the tight corner of Crawford's mouth. The sinking feeling was automated, programmed into his body; he swore softly and followed the kiss with his tongue. "No sudden movements."

Crawford's thumbs pressed once, twice, symmetrically across Schuldig's hipbones beneath his shirt, but then his hands were gone and Schuldig breathed in saying, "Come back here," before his eyes were fully open, and just like that, Crawford's hands were back, roped too tightly in Schuldig's salt tangled hair, and he couldn't say anything else because he was caught between Crawford's mouth and the railing – and Schuldig had never been kissed like that, not ever, and definitely never by Crawford.

He was too tired to fight it, so he gave himself up to the new experience and he gripped Crawford's shoulders so he wouldn't be tempted to force the attack away, to gave his fingers other jobs to keep them busy, to prevent them from falling back on old habit, namely, deflection.

Hesitantly, Schuldig slipped barely, briefly, into the very surface of Crawford's thoughts, like the tip of a thorny vine. It was too easy to get in, felt too much like a trap, and there was nothing there – so Schuldig backed quickly out.

"I don't like you all open," Schuldig said against Crawford's mouth, but he confused himself by going back for another kiss, another deep . . .fuck, all tongue and wet and only a little teeth and something else beneath it. "We do better keeping secrets," he said, but he was thinking about the nothing he'd seen there in Crawford's head, a scary void like the goddamn sea behind him. Schuldig needed noise and surprises and chaos; he didn't need something that could swallow him up.

"I'm not open." Crawford was preoccupied with Schuldig's jaw.

"Bullshit, I just . . ." he started, half-heartedly, it was hard to argue when his mouth had better things to do. Schuldig didn't know what he was supposed to think, and that was the problem.

Crawford drew back and looked at him and, again, Schuldig thought if he could just look at both of Crawford's eyes at once, he'd be able to figure something out. "Your hair's all messed up," Schuldig said because he couldn't think of anything better, and almost reached up to fix it. He caught himself at the last moment. His hand hovered between them, uncertain, level with Crawford's ear.

Crawford eyed it, suspicious, still faintly amused, and Schuldig slouched back against the railing, dropped his hands back to his sides.

"I've forgotten how to do this," Schuldig said.

"I don't think we've ever done this." The ice in Crawford's drink, discarded on a low table behind him, popped in the humid heat. A tropical wasteland. Crawford went to retrieve it, and leaned back against the grey, weathered walls to contemplate the gin and wait for Schuldig's next realization.

Schuldig leaned forward and stole the drink. "Why am I the only one that's being rebooted?" The glass felt slippery in his hand, and he had a sudden image of himself accidentally dropping it. Schuldig couldn't tell if the vision was prescience or paranoia, there seemed to be too much of one and not enough of the other among the two other occupants of the house – he felt like he was trying to keep up with everyone's work now that none of them had anything to do.

"There are too many ways I can answer that, and all the answers are correct. Simply, I'm curious, that's all. I wonder if you really know what you want."

"I think that's true for everyone," he said, taking a long gulp of the drink. He continued around a piece of ice in his mouth, "and I should know, better than you, or those fuckers that were always tinkering with us – what motivates anyone. No one knows why they do anything. They just do it because they can. You've been trying to convince me that I don't know anything since we first got stuck together. We've always done this, whatever it is, because there's no one else to do it with."

Crawford laughed, "Are you referring to the arguing or the fucking? For myself, I could have had the same, of lesser quality, from anyone I've met, with fewer troubles." Silently, Crawford added, I didn't have to come back here and you didn't have to wait and Schuldig was so shocked to hear Crawford again in his head that he almost missed the backhanded seduction.

"Why did you come back, then?" Schuldig said, and slapped a mosquito trying to bite his arm, which caused the drink to slosh onto his shorts, which caused him to drop the glass. He and Crawford stared at the fine, crystal shards on the sandy floor. The prettiest things always broke the hardest.

"The broom pan's in the hall closet," Nagi called out from the other room.

And Schuldig started laughing, brokenly, unendingly, desperately, as if he'd never really laughed at himself before, or the ludicrous positions they all put themselves in. Between breaths, he tried to speak. "Will you please . . ." he pressed his hands to his face to try to compose himself, to little effect. "Will you please make me another drink? S'il vous plait. And kill the goddamn French channel down the street because it's competing with Nagi's Finnish. And . . . Nagi!"

A chair slid, fifteen footsteps crossed the gritty floor and Nagi pressed his forehead to the screen.

"Will you hand me the broom, thing, pan" – Schuldig made a sweeping motion – "or zap it up for me. Come on."

Through the screen, Schuldig saw Nagi's hands pressed too tightly into the pockets of his too-long pants. "No. This is a normal place. We do things with our hands here. You have to clean up your own mess, Crawford said so. Didn't you?" Nagi's cheek pressed to the screen as he turned to catch a glimpse of Crawford who still leaned on the wall.

"Something like that, yes, but you're taking everything out of context, which is usually Schuldig's job. Clean up the mess for him before he steps on a sliver and we have to hear about it for a very long time."

"Schuldig needs to learn how to do things for himself," Nagi said, but he closed his eyes, and his hair pressed between his brow and the indentation of his face against the screen. The slivers lifted and reformed into a glass that touched down on the wood with a careful, hollow, ding. A useless bell. The glass would have been perfect, if it were not empty.

"Nagi," Schuldig pleaded. "Will you please . . ."

"I'll get it." Crawford picked up the glass.

Schuldig had tried for years to get one of them, any of them, to cater to him, but it worried him that Crawford and Nagi both offered to help at once. It made him a little frightened – like they knew something he didn't.

Rosenkruez people had tended to walk quietly around Schuldig, afraid to set him off; the ones that got a hold of him after tried to do everything to set him off, to see how far he would go. When Schuldig graduated out into the world, he was an archaic pharmacy of poisons, all corked bottles and hand-written labels, no telling what any of them would do, but they would do something, and that was all that mattered. Now he had two sets of eyes watching him, and an invisible third they'd let slip away, absent but omnipresent, just the way Farfarello liked it – he might as well have been there with them, silent in some corner – and Schuldig felt like a controlled experiment. What happens if we add X?

The sound of the insects was viscous, oily, sliding across Schuldig's skin. Maybe he had liked it better underwater, but even then he'd felt the ping of thoughts, internal sonar, because they had to keep moving; they had to get out.

The door slammed against the porch wall.

Crawford handed him a fresh drink, and Schuldig downed it quickly to be certain nothing happened to it before he finished. He stared into the cup. "You don't think Nagi missed a piece of glass or something." Schuldig had an irrational fear of ingesting splintered glass; he'd once had a front row seat to a show of deliberate exposure to veninum lupinum and he could think of better ways to go.

"It's a different glass."

They stared at each other

"Want to go shoot something?" Crawford suggested.

"Sure."

Schuldig made a valid argument in support of target practice on the French family, but Crawford turned him down on the basis of their proximity and the fact that they had to stay put for the next few weeks or the timeline would shift and Crawford would be forced to recalculate the likelihood of the few remaining Eszett hunters crossing their path much sooner than they expected.

"I'd rather spend the time remaining drinking gin," Crawford said, and Schuldig reluctantly agreed.

They settled on the thin manchineel tree at the top of one of the larger dunes near the house and Schuldig felt his finger fit into the familiar groove of the trigger as he followed one step behind Crawford and tried his best to ignore the water.

He continued to ignore the water as he watched Crawford empty a clip and smile in the bright darkness, flat, wet, ripples reaching out in all directions toward the black horrible horizon. Schuldig's feet sank into the sand as he waited his turn.

"You know," Crawford continued, "they used to tie prisoners to the trunks of these trees. The sap is so poisonous that rain drops dripping through the branches can cause blindness."

"I knew that." Schuldig said, and kissed the grip of his Luger before decimating twelve petite apples. "I see better in the dark." But the moon was ridiculous, luminous, catching the toxic spray of the fruit in flecked splinters of white against the black backdrop of the water, perfect as shattered glass. Schuldig reloaded his gun.

"What's the plan?" Schuldig massacred a lone root.

"Nagi suggested Austria."

"I don't have any use for that country."

"He wants to see what's left."

"I'm sure you two will enjoy yourselves." Schuldig felt a tremor of something he hadn't felt in months.

Crawford shrugged; he hadn't bothered to rebutton his shirt, the tails caught on the breeze, everything was rearranged, out of place, different. "We should go back now."

"Why?"

Crawford glanced at the sky. Schuldig hadn't noticed the distant lightning or the way the wind had shifted approach. "There's a storm coming."

Schuldig wasn't ready to go back, but he followed Crawford toward the dim light of the porch.

There wasn't a single language coming from the house. "Nagi feels like he can sleep now. I told him to sleep before, but he only took naps in the daytime, or he'd fall asleep sitting up, which was creepy. Did you know he doesn't always close his eyes all the way when he sleeps?" Schuldig mimicked half-slits of white with his own eyes, then forced the lids open with his thumb and forefinger, trying not to blink against the wind that made the blades of the ceiling fan speed up on the porch. "It would have to dry his eyeballs out, sleeping like that."

He'd figured out how to talk again, which made his mouth seem less foreign, to himself, to Crawford, but the commentary hadn't ceased during their short walk back from the beach, burs against Schuldig's heels, gravel between his toes. His gun was shoved into his waistband at the back of his shorts, and its presence seemed to open up the unnatural quiet of the preceding weeks.

"I never noticed."

"It freaks me out."

"Clearly."

"Where did you go?"

"That's what this is all about?"

"And other things."

"I cleaned up all the loose ends. If you're so curious, you should take a look." He tapped his head.

"Stop doing that. I don't want to know what you're thinking."

"Why not? The last time I saw you, that was the only thing you were trying to accomplish."

"People change."

"Now you start to get the point."

The railing was slick from rain, the splinters fused together, elemental adhesive.

"Toujours . . ."

"Stop ." Crawford gripped the gun as he loosened Schuldig's belt. The barrel traced the sharp line of Schuldig's spine, made him arc forward toward Crawford's chest.

"That," Schuldig gasped, "I understand."

He wanted to know why this – the kissing was a late entry, made him feel the same that he did when a wound was being stitched up, all the essential parts numb. Crawford was a shot of novocaine, present but nerveless, a phantom limb. Schuldig responded by rote memory.

He had two options: keeping up as he'd done since Crawford came through the door, or giving in and seeing the result of Crawford's experiment, seeing where this was heading.

"You don't even know what you're doing," Schuldig said between the slide of the sand beneath his foot as he spread his legs and the way his chin tilted back. Schuldig's fingers wrapped around the back of Crawford's neck so he could force Crawford's mouth where he wanted it – down would be nice, but he settled for a lick to the collar bone, and teeth not quite catching in the hollow of his throat.

"No I don't," Crawford agreed, as he pulled back. "But neither do you, so the odds are even."

"I've seen it second hand," Schuldig said, and shot him a look that meant to say fuck you but ended up seeming confused.

"What have you seen?" Crawford asked.

"This."

"So, you know what this is then?"

"A challenge. Same as always." Schuldig studied the line of Crawford's jaw. It was funny how something so familiar, something so deeply embedded in Schuldig's routine, could seem unrecognizable from a different angle. Schuldig hated weak chins.

"Schuldig." Like Crawford's tone was familiar, commanding.

"What?"

"Stop thinking." It was, again, the amusement behind Crawford's tone that broke Schuldig's trance.

"I don't think that's possible."

In Crawford's typical, half-assed way of answering, he gazed at Schuldig for a moment and then turned and went back into the house. Schuldig watched the tattered screen door slam shut behind him before he roused himself enough to follow. Inevitably, Schuldig's bare feet followed his curiosity, which led to the vine choked room at the back of the house; the room Schuldig had been avoiding. He wondered if rooms, like people, could store premonitions.

Crawford didn't look right without shoes. Schuldig noted this first before he looked up. "You're not wearing shoes," he said. "Why?"

But then Crawford was on him, pinning him to the flimsy wall, mouth and hips and, same as what they were doing on the porch, but faster, more urgent, Crawford's hands too hot against his skin. They'd always fucked because they could, because there was no one else for them to go to sleep with and forget about it with afterward: having to gather clothes, wipe minds, offer plausible explanations – it all got old after a while. Schuldig had never stopped to think that they did this for any other motivation than convenience. But as Crawford's mouth went back the pulse at Schuldig's neck, he asked himself what he had been waiting for all those nights camped out on the humid porch, the mosquito bites, the throaty push of the tides, all that fucking water.

He couldn't breathe. He remembered being washed up on the shore, heaving salt water that was body-temperature, warm, burning his esophagus. But he also remembered the single moment before Nagi pushed him up, no sound, no thoughts, offering himself up to the water like a damned sacrifice. There had been something euphoric in giving himself up to the opiate silence. Okay. You win. Take me. One second, suspended, control shredded in the current. Schuldig had been so long trained to win; he had forgotten what it felt like to give up, weightless, doomed.

Until now, with Crawford's hip pressed against his cock; impossible to breathe. Drowning was an action that started in the mouth. Schuldig's eyes slid shut. It was easier not to fight it.

"I've known you half my life," Schuldig said, trying to push Crawford's belt down without undoing the buckle, he'd get to it soon, but he liked the feeling of his knuckles cramped between skin and soft leather, no room to give. "But I don't think I know you at all."

Crawford paused, drew back, and looked at him. Schuldig kept his cheek pressed to the wall, and peered from the corner of his eye. He pulled his hand out of Crawford's belt and waved it dismissively before his fingers trailed up Crawford's chest. "You've only shown me what you've wanted me to see."

"I'd say that's true of the rest of the world." Crawford's hands were heavy on Schuldig's hips.

"But we're different." Schuldig turned to face him, inched forward and bit at Crawford's mouth. "Or so you said. You want me to make this easy for you, but I can't. I won't. I've been in control of this since the first night I drank too much, passed out on your bed and woke up with your fingers in my mouth. It's your call now. What will it be?"

Crawford's hands left Schuldig's hips, the pressure between them lessened, and Crawford's palms pressed flat against the wall to either side of Schuldig's head, ready to move away.

"Yeah, I thought so," Schuldig said, ready to turn away. But then Crawford's hands were back, sliding across Schuldig's cheeks, snagging in Schuldig's hair, "Hey!" Schuldig warned, but then Crawford's mouth swallowed up the rest of his complaint and the wall gave Schuldig nothing to grab hold of, so he took the first thing he could find to keep from sliding down, to keep Crawford from holding him up by the hair and the taste of his tongue. Schuldig dug his fingers into Crawford's belt, not enough, grappled at the skin at the small of Crawford's back. Still not steady, Schuldig wrapped his arms around Crawford's waist, a magnificent failure, and gave up.

The angle kept shifting. Their mouths sliding against each other – left not enough, right too much, and like a shot of adrenaline, Schuldig remembered that Crawford was open, more than teeth and tongue and slanting pressure, their mouths trying to prove a wordless point. Schuldig allowed himself to dip into Crawford's mind briefly, like a hand to the water, testing the temperature. The middle was the only safe place. Too cold, he could freeze. Too hot, he could boil. Too much, he could drown. There was nothing at the surface, so he looked closer.

Schuldig didn't know what he thought he would see, but he wasn't prepared to see himself. Crawford was the mirror of impressions, self-control that could choke an elephant, but that's what made it different than looking through someone else's eyes – and Schuldig had looked through everyone he'd fucked. Not like this.

Crawford's control brought Schuldig into sharp focus. There was nothing else, no room, no island, no ocean, no future – not then. Only Schuldig's skin in the fractured light, and Schuldig's eyes, panicked, manic, luminous like the inappropriately large moon, a trick of water and the moment.

Schuldig stared back at himself, millimeters of space between them, just far enough for him to see his own chin, the hollows of his cheeks, the hundred shades that composed the brightness of his hair in the monochromatic room. Beneath it all was a drowning hunger that made Schuldig want to scratch his own skin, break beneath the surface, touch his own kiss swollen lips.

"If we keep up like this, I'll be fucking myself," Schuldig said, and laughed, stopping short when he saw how far his smile didn't meet his transfixed eyes. Schuldig never thought he'd see something he could label the embodiment of fear, though he'd seen a lot, and he'd collected the expressions people took on in their last moments. But the fear he saw was always tinged with something else: surprise, regret, acceptance. Watching his own expression, he couldn't look away, couldn't draw back. The thing that leaned against the wall was okay with death, but terrified of the present.

He took the same road out of Crawford's mind, but not fast enough to miss his eyes half closing as he pulled Crawford back to his mouth.

Yeah. He'd fuck himself.

"Are you satisfied now?" Crawford said between breaths.

"I only saw what you wanted me to see."

Schuldig felt Crawford shrug, arms hooked beneath Crawford's arms, holding tight to his shoulders. Teeth at Schuldig's collar bone, a moment of weightlessness as Schuldig's back left the wall, and then he was pushing Crawford across the room toward the bed.

"You've come to a decision?" Crawford asked and Schuldig shoved him hard enough to steal the last word. He landed on his back, elbows braced back against the mattress. Schuldig paused a moment to study Crawford's face, since, apparently, he could do anything he wanted.

"Take your glasses off."

Crawford did as he was told, which made Schuldig pause. "Why don't you wear contacts or get your eyes cut on or something?"

Crawford folded the glasses neatly and placed them on the barren bedside table among the landscape of lamp and clock.

"I never gave it much thought," Crawford said. "There were all those other things to consider, until now."

"I don't believe you."

"Contacts hurt my eyes and no one's coming near my face with a laser."

"That's more like it." Schuldig pressed his knee between Crawford's legs on the mattress and Crawford leaned up to meet his mouth.

The belts were the first things to go. Click and fumble and slide. Schuldig shoved Crawford's shirt off his shoulders, cotton pooling at the crook of his arms, reluctant to move until Schuldig wrapped his legs around him, waist to waist, pushing the shirt away by memory as their mouths figured out the new way of doing thing. Schuldig straddled him, crossing his ankles and closing his hips to keep Crawford close as he sat on top of him.

"Look now," Crawford said against Schuldig's mouth. "Look." His head tilted back, watching, keeping Schuldig in his sight.

Despite himself, Schuldig reached out, slightly, slowly. His eyes were half-closed, the barest smirk at the corners of his lips, a drop of blood welling up at the edge of his wind-burned mouth, there at the bottom. He watched himself say, "I don't like this," but he didn't draw back.

"What do you like?" Crawford asked, and it was so close that Schuldig was puzzled, confused that his own lips didn't move to speak. He heard Crawford's voice from inside, echoed in his ears.

He watched himself say, "This is the shortest route to madness." Before he was leaning down, obsessed with what he must taste like, feel like.

"Oh," he moaned into Crawford's mouth, tasted in his own mouth. Pressing deeper, he wondered where the hell he'd learned to kiss like that. The rest was lost in sensation.

Foremost, you should love yourself, Schuldig thought.

"Why are you laughing?"

Schuldig pulled back fully, thoughts and skin. He locked his hands together behind Crawford's neck, leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

"I'm trying to decide if this is real or masturbation."

"A little bit of both," Crawford said and flipped them from sitting to lying, Schuldig's body pinned between him and the mattress, Schuldig's legs still locked around his waist. "Feel free to experience this however you like, inside, outside, both – but I want you to be here." Crawford pulled him forward by the hair. "You'll be here. No wandering. Got it?"

Schuldig arched up into the heat and hardness, as much from seeing himself as having another body near. "Oh, yes," he slurred and he wondered why he had never tried it before.

Schuldig watched himself, past the French voices and Nagi's silence. Past the death song of the waves and the scattered echo of gunshot, the poisoned fruit breaking apart. He watched himself offer himself up. It was easier to give up control in third person, or second, depending on the angle.

He watched his face pressed to the pillow. He wondered what went through his head as he stared through the vines on the window. He watched his eyes close as he bit Crawford's knuckle, and he knew there had to be something to drown the heat or else he'd burn himself up.

When he looked at himself through Crawford's eyes without a hundred distractions or obligations, Schuldig realized he couldn't read his own thoughts, so he'd sink back down into his head and he'd listen, a confused expression on his face, or that might be caused by Crawford's hand too loose on his cock – and he'd listen . . .

"You're right!" Schuldig sat up suddenly, propping himself on his elbows just as Crawford was working his way down Schuldig's stomach. "Shit. Sorry. My hip's too sharp." Schuldig pressed his hand to his own face in sympathy and synchronicity. Maybe he wasn't entirely detached.

Crawford was still half clothed, Schuldig made a note to get more involved, as he realized his clothes were bunched underneath his legs. He kicked them aside.

"I usually am," Crawford said, really past conversation but lying down beside Schuldig for the sake of the experiment. Frustration coursed off of Crawford in waves of heat and freezing cold, so separated by extremes the two sensations were indistinguishable.

Schuldig started picking at his lower lips, habit, buying valuable time to construct a coherent reason for his outburst. "I can't read my own thoughts," he said, at last, staring at a point past Crawford's shoulders.

"You wouldn't be able to if you were trying to read them through me," Crawford said, clinically, his jaw clenched.

"But I have thoughts," Schuldig still picked at his lip.

"Unfortunately, yes."

"You know this for certain."

"We all know this."

"And you wouldn't just be saying that me make me shut up?"

Crawford dropped his head back to the pillow and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. "No," quiet, short.

"This is all your doing," Schuldig reminded him. "All, Nagi watch freaky art movies in strange languages and keep yourself open, and let Schuldig figure things out. Where the fuck did you think this would bring me?" Schuldig propped his head up on his hand and stared down at Crawford. "Well?"

Crawford's eyes were still concealed by his hands. "I don't know."

"What do you mean, 'I don't know'?"

Crawford rose up abruptly and stared back. "I don't know," he spoke each word clearly.

Schuldig's hand itched for his gun. Crawford's index finger tapped against Schuldig's hip. They stared at each other as the seconds ticked by. Schuldig noted, absently, that the left side of Crawford's jaw twitched.

There was only one way that this could end.

They moved simultaneously. Schuldig reached blindly behind his back for the gun on the side table and ended up with Crawford's glasses, which he crushed as Crawford's hand closed around his fist. Schuldig's other hand was pinned to the mattress. Their faces were too close.

"Where's yours?" Schuldig said, though his eyes were sliding shut and his tongue met Crawford's halfway. The next few moments were taken up with the sort of desperate kissing that meant a matter had been fully resolved and it was time to move onto another.

"Still in my back pocket," Crawford said against Schuldig's mouth. He felt the corner of Crawford's lips quirk. "Why didn't you go for that one instead?"

Finally, a language that Schuldig knew. He pushed Crawford back onto the mattress, a sharp knee to either side of Crawford's hips. "Finally. Where the hell have you been?"

"I was detained in Beijing."

"Where's Farfarello?"

"He went his own way. We'll meet up with him later."

"How long have you been suppressing your visions?"

"They picked up on me in Thailand."

"An experiment?" Schuldig said levelly, and traced his thumb in a hard, roaming line from Crawford's forehead to his mouth. "I know who I am, you son of a bitch, the question is – do you know what you want?"

"Not really," Crawford said, and laughed.

"I can't believe that you had me thinking everyone was doing this because of me."

"I needed you to pay attention to everything that passed through this island. At least until I could get here. Nagi needed a job, and the last thing I wanted was for him to think something was wrong with me."

"It's all my fault."

"Always."

Schuldig leaned forward and pressed down, their bodies moved together in a near perfect answer to any question. "At least that's the same," Schuldig said and went back to the kissing because he was intrigued by innovation. The rules had to change with the circumstances, or who knew where they'd end up.

Their mouths were occupied with other things, so Schuldig worked by familiarity, removing Crawford's pants, pushing them down with his feet. The pants landed heavily with a thud from the gun in the back pocket, followed by the rest of the things, against the sand scarred floor.

"You're really bad at hiding things," Schuldig continued, dipping in here and there, mesmerized by seeing his own expressions. Crawford was solid weight beneath him, muscle and mass over bone, the opposite of fabrication, or longing. Schuldig blindly reached over to the bed side table, with better success this time as his fingers found what they searched for.

"Empathy isn't your strong suit," Crawford said, and he might have planned to say something else, but Schuldig sank back down, hip to hip, and pulled Crawford up so they were both sitting and could, more easily, continue the conversation mouth to mouth.

There was always a moment of eerie calm, suspended, Schuldig's back arced into the press of Crawford's palm against his lower back, caught in the incisor sharp bite of their continuing argument. Years of ambiguity that always ended up like this. Schuldig opened his eyes slowly and stared up at the warped bevels of the ceiling boards. He always expected to see something different, permission maybe, or want, not the rusting abstract of fact.

"No it isn't," Schuldig offered up to the ceiling before his eyes slid shut again. "But I know your future."

Trading in futures was risky, a gamble of certainty. There were too many factors, whims and fluctuations. As they moved together, Schuldig traded all pretense of an interest in Crawford and slipped into his mind to view himself, watching the thing that moved on top of Crawford.

At first glance, the figure was blurry; Schuldig should have kept Crawford's glasses on, but it was difficult for Schuldig to take him seriously when he wore them, like a pair of ocular socks, plus they were crushed on the floor. He'd learned early on to not break out in sudden laughter when Crawford was fucking him. The joke needed to be shared.

He looked closer. It was difficult to not be overly conscious of what Crawford was doing with his hands, even as he tried to watch himself. He admired the geometric abstract of the knuckle on Crawford's thumb as he reached up to drag Schuldig down, the press at his solar plexus, hollow of his throat and the base of his chin. Schuldig watched the thumb disappear into his mouth, watched his eyes sink shut, his cheeks hollowed and followed his stolen sight down to the view of his palms pressed to either side of Crawford's head against the salt damp pillow, intersected by the shadow of the vines.

Shit, he was supposed to be in Crawford's head.

The point of this game was to see when one of them would lose focus. Schuldig raised his hips up, lowered them and felt Crawford try to urge him on.

It was also about delayed gratification. Schuldig's position should have given him an advantage, but when he looked up at himself through Crawford's eyes and felt Crawford's own trademarked methods of repression, Schuldig realized that wasn't the case.

Schuldig saw that his lips were slack, swollen. "Do something or I'm going back outside to drink gin," he said, but his sweat-slick fingers tangled in Crawford's hair and the lazy shifts of his hips said otherwise.

"Let me show you," Crawford said and reached up as Schuldig sat back and then they were both sitting, still, equal only in their incapacitated breathing and their fists gripping the sheets.

"But you're not listening to me . . ."

Crawford swallowed the rest and the next thing Schuldig knew, he was flat on his back, his mind where it belonged and his heels thighs pressing to Crawford's side. Seeing had nothing to do with it. Schuldig's head was halfway off the bed and he felt the weight of it stretching across his larynx. Speechless, exposed, he felt the imaginary pull of a sharp knife against his throat and despite himself, he laughed.

Crawford, let the laugh go this once and didn't miss a beat.

Finally, after near drowning and two interminable months, the balance was back to normal.

Schuldig didn't close his eyes as he came. He turned his head to stare out the window, the dense saw teeth of the thorns along the vine, fingernails scraping hard enough to draw blood, to try to draw blood, because everything had a purpose, and everything would kill itself to see it done. The roots of the poison apples saving the dunes from the wind until the wind blew the tree down. Or bullets blew it up.

Schuldig shrugged Crawford off and curled up on his side. Semen dripped down his stomach, his mouth felt as if it had been cured with salt, and when Schuldig felt Crawford move close behind him, breath like a premonition prickling the back of Schuldig's neck, he lay quietly and waited for the feeling to pass.

As the minutes ticked past, Schuldig didn't get up to go sleep on the porch, and it was the closest he could come to voicing his decision.


End file.
